Call centers are known in which incoming calls are routed to one of a plurality of agents. For example, the call center might provide help desk facilities for a particular group of products and customers who are able to call in and be allocated to an agent who has the necessary skills to deal with his or her query. Each agent has one or more skills, for example, a particular agent has knowledge about sales for product X and about technical support for product Y. An incoming call is received and information from that call used by the call center, together with information about the agents, in order to route the incoming call to an agent with the appropriate skill. For example, an interactive voice response system (IVR system) may be used to find out what type of agent skill is required. Associated with each skill is a queue into which incoming calls are placed until an agent with that skill becomes available.
The terms “call center” and “contact center” as used herein are not intended to be restricted to situations in which telephone calls are made to the center. Other types of call or contact are also envisaged, such as email, fax, SMS, chat, web access and any other suitable method of contact including conventional telephone calls and voice over internet protocol telephone calls. Similarly, the terms “call” and “contact” as used herein are not intended to be restricted to conventional telephone calls but include contacts made by email, fax, voice over IP and any other suitable medium.
As volumes of traffic increase to call centers and as the number of different agent skills increases the complexity of routing incoming calls to the appropriate queues also increases, This is a particular problem for call centers that provide technical support, for example, for software products. In that situation the agent skills required are highly specialised, the agents themselves being software design or support engineers with knowledge about particular aspects of software products. If the customer has a software support issue the information needed from that customer in order to most appropriately route an incoming call from that customer is significant. If an IVR system is used as described above then the menu structure of the IVR system is necessarily complex in order to obtain the information needed to route the call most appropriately. This is problematic both for the customer and for the provider of the call center. The customer experiences a lengthy and complex interface before being able to speak to an actual agent; and the call center provider has to establish and maintain a complex and expensive IVR or other system for routing incoming calls.
There are also many situations in which software applications provide critical services or in which software providers have entered into support contracts with their customers. In these situations the software provider needs to have a quick and effective way of dealing with support queries from the customer and to provide this service over long time periods, often making support available 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Software support providers need an effective, simple and cost effective way in which this can be achieved.
Providers of computer hardware have considered the problem of how to create a hardware computer system that is continuously available despite hardware errors. For example, Stratus Technologies (trade mark) describe fault-tolerant servers and other hardware architectures which they provide on their web site at www.stratus.com. They describe how during operation of a Stratus system, processing proceeds in parallel on duplexed hardware. Checks are made for hardware errors at every machine clock cycle. If a hardware fault is detected then the faulty component is stopped and a partner component comes into operation to replace that faulty component. They also describe reporting the fault automatically to a customer assistance center. A replacement component is then dispatched via overnight delivery to the customer.
An object of the present invention is therefore to provide an improved method and apparatus for using information about software events to route contacts in a contact center which overcomes or at least mitigates one or more of the problems noted above.
Further benefits and advantages of the invention will become apparent from a consideration of the following detailed description given with reference to the accompanying drawings, which specify and show preferred embodiments of the invention.